Bagels are coming to a Dallas neighborhood that currently does not have them: K&L Bagels will open at 4333 Lovers Ln., in a well-positioned storefront near the Dallas North Tollway, going into a space most recently (and briefly) occupied by a butcher.
The bagel shop will open in the next few weeks, says co-owner Lisa Kouzoukas, who owns K&L with her husband Kyriakos.
The couple have been in the bagel business since 1999, when they began operating doughnut and bagel shops in the Boston area before moving to Dallas in 2018. This will be the second K&L; they opened the first at the Preston Forest shopping center at 11930 Preston Rd #110 in February.
"It's been going well at Preston and Forest but we've seen a lot of customers from the Lovers Lane area," Lisa says. "When this location opened, we jumped on it."
They're not just a bagel shop, but more of a casual breakfast-and-lunch cafe where bagels take center stage. In addition to 19 varieties of bagels and 10 cream cheese spreads, their menu includes eggs, muffins, and sandwiches like a chicken salad club on choice of bagel, sourdough, or wheat bread.
The Lovers location has a kitchen but for now it'll serve as a satellite, and they'll keep the bagel-making operation — boiling and baking bagels every day — at Preston Forest, and make deliveries to Lovers Lane.
Jerusalem bagel at K&L BagelsK&L
The Lovers Lane location does not have a dining room but there'll be a few seats in front of the store; most of their business is to-go.
The couple are most famous for helping to popularize rainbow-colored bagels locally. Rainbow bagels, which first emerged at a Brooklyn bagel shop in 2015, are really just plain bagels but with tint added to the dough to create a colorful appearance.
K&L offers those — but, ever ahead of the curve, have seized on a newer hot trend, the Jerusalem bagel, which is a popular street food in the middle East that's unlike New York-style bagels: a loose oval shape with a crisp crust and fluffy texture inside — more bready, less dense, and calling for a different approach to your cream cheese and/or topping application.
"It's long and slender like a bread stick, coated with sesame seeds and a little bit sweeter," Lisa says. "Instead of slicing, you pull it apart and dip it into cream cheese. It's not yet popular in this region, my husband is Greek, he knows about it from seeing it in Greece. We do it on the weekends, along with the rainbow bagels."
Rendering of Sloan Corners' 121 retail corridor.Photo courtesy of Billingsley Company